"Google has released a research paper that suggests C++ is the best-performing programming language in the market. The internet giant implemented a compact algorithm in four languages - C++, Java, Scala and its own programming language Go - and then benchmarked results to find 'factors of difference'."

Turbo Pascal was pretty fast. Never really caught on, except for Delphi and a few other niche languages.

I programmed in Delphi for a few years back when it was still fairly popular. Borland's Pascal compilers were very fast as far as compilation speed goes... Compared to pretty much any C/C++ compiler it was at least an order or magnitude faster (or more even - mostly due to it's single pass nature).

However, it did very little as far a optimizing the performance of the resulting executable (also at least partially due to it being a single pass compiler). It was fairly dumb to be honest. It did default to using registers for parameter passing and avoided building a stack when it could, but other than that it didn't do much of anything interesting.

I don't know much about free pascal, but I see it at least has SSE support, something that Delphi never had back in the day (it was purely x87 unless you did SSE explicitly using 3rd party libs). I would be quite surprised to see a single pass pascal compiler doing the kind of trans-formative optimization that you get from GCC or other modern compilers. There are many types of optimization that are simply not possible without multiple passes.